Coming off my blogiversary post on Saturday, I was catching up on some TED/TEDx videos and one of them made me think of the originality post I talked about re-visiting within the next year. The speaker not only touches on fantasy tropes being tropes and therefore not original, but also about the not unheard of concept that fantasy helps understand reality.
In fact, it’s not just fantasy, there’s science fiction as well. And I see some horror fans’ hackles rising, so let’s just say “speculative fiction” and move along to Dr. Adler’s talk, which is a bit deeper into the sci-fi section of storytelling… and fantastical storytelling in general. He actually goes all the way back to Gilgamesh!
Basically, you dig a little, you’ll get a lot of TEDx talks that touch on the value of speculative fiction and storytelling in general helping us humans make sense of reality, so it’s not that it’s original, it’s that it doesn’t hurt as a reminder — often of the human dimension. Because I can say from personal experience that telling someone the tale of The Hobbit is deeply fulfilling.